HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania school districts may be spending millions too much on busing, the state auditor general said Tuesday.
Examinations by his office found 19 school districts in 11 counties paid a total of $54.8 million more for transportation during different periods between 2004 and 2014 than what the state determined was the maximum amount it would consider for the calculation of reimbursements, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said.
Only one of those districts had competitively bid transportation services during the audit periods, according to DePasquale. He said school districts should be required to seek bids on such contracts.
“I want to put more education dollars into our classrooms, not in our school buses,” he said at a news conference at which he made the recommendation.
Among the school districts he flagged was the Souderton Area School District in Montgomery County, which DePasquale said had paid $5.7 million more than its maximum allowable transportation costs during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 years.
In a statement, the Souderton district said that although it does not use a competitive bidding process for student transportation, it has worked to get the best value for the service, as evidenced by a March 2015 contract with three years of no increase to district costs and two years of 1 percent increases.
The district also said it is impractical to compare its transportation costs to its reimbursement amount under the state formula because the formula does not account for the high cost of living in southeastern Pennsylvania or for the prevalence of students who must be transported to institutions that provide special education.
“The funding formula applies a ’one size fits all’ approach to a much nuanced service provided by districts,” the Souderton statement says.
DePasquale also cited six school districts in Allegheny County, including Allegheny Valley, Deer Lakes, Highlands, Riverview, Woodland Hills and West Jefferson, for paying between $871,000 and $4.9 million above their maximum allowable costs during the years under review. DePasquale noted that Riverview School District had competitively bid transportation services during the audit period.
Ira Weiss, solicitor for the Highlands School District, said the district’s contract with a local company freezes its transportation rates in the upcoming school year. But he said rates are not the only consideration.
“The quality of the service is very important,” he said. ”It’s not like buying widgets.”
The other districts named by the auditor general were in Lackawanna, Washington, Armstrong, Blair, Crawford, Greene, Lehigh, McKean and Westmoreland counties.
The state calculates a district’s maximum allowable transportation cost from the number of students transported and the number of miles traveled, according to the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials. A measure of local wealth then is used to calculate how much of the maximum allowable cost will be reimbursed by the state.
PASBO said in a statement that it agrees with encouraging the periodic bidding of transportation contracts. But it said the formula used to determine the maximum allowable cost should be reviewed.
In a phone interview, Jeff Ammerman, director of member assistance for PASBO, said a district’s maximum allowable cost is increased each year by the consumer price index, but that this measure does not account for changes in the price of fuel.
“If the CPI goes up by 3 percent but the price of fuel goes up by 200 percent, this maximum allowable cost formula doesn’t really take that into account,” Ammerman said.
The spending by the 19 districts was found during audits of about 450 of the state’s 500 school districts, with about 63 percent of those audits examining transportation costs, according to the auditor general’s office.
Karen Langley: klangley@post-gazette.com or 717-787-2141 or on Twitter @karen_langley.
First Published: May 12, 2016, 6:52 p.m.
Updated: May 13, 2016, 3:17 a.m.